Feb
01
It seems like it is official according to Techcrunch. Microsoft made a bid to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. Quite a hefty amount of money if you ask me, but strangely I thought it should have been more. Strange.
Anyway, from a technical perspective, I wonder if all Yahoo!’s assets are going to have to “convert” to more Microsoft-centric technologies or if Microsoft is going to keep it as it is. In that case, I wonder how many of Yahoo!’s assets run on Linux. Even more so, I wonder if Microsoft is going to stop their “we’ll sue you for patent infringement” bullshit once and for all if that is the case. I reckon it would be quite interesting to know these things. Anyone got a bunch of links to some of the above mentioned information?
I’m almost dead sure Facebook does NOT run on IIS/Windows servers. I might be wrong, but I doubt it. If Facebook does in fact run on Linux, I have three words for Mark Zuckerberg: “Watch you back…”
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General and sometimes Rants, Linux, Open Source Stii
Feb
01
Still, it is lightweight and clean. Kohana is a Code Igniter fork that is completely open source and community driven. If you are used to Code Igniter, then Kohana would be a walk in the park. The one major difference is that Kohana is exclusively for PHP 5 while Code Igniter supports from PHP 4 and up. Kohana is strinctly OOP with benefits like visibility protection, automatic class loading, overloading, interfaces, abstracts, and singletons. Cool!
Whats more is that while Code Igniter supports only $POST arrays and no GET, Kohana lets POST and GET arrays live together in harmony with the same tight security of Code Igniter.
Another trivial thing thats always kind of bugged me of Code Igniter is the directory structure. Kohana’s directory structure makes a lot more sense. See, Code Igniter has one directory at the root called System. In this directory is a bunch of subdirectories of which your application directory is a part of. Kohana went and put the application directory with the system directory on the root path. I know, I know, it really is pedantic of me, but it just makes so much more sense to do something so insignificant. Well, actually, on second thought, its not as trivial as it might seem. Come upgrade time, you only need to upgrade the system folder and your application folder would be untouched. Code Igniter stores a bunch of system related files in their app folder which could get overwritten when upgrading, but need to be upgrade every once in a while as they do make changes to those files occasionally.
Another thing is that changes and fixes happens a lot faster in Kohana as it is a community project. Code Igniter is brilliant, but it was kind of slowish in releasing fixes and improvements as Ellis Labs first do Expression Engine (it seems) then Code Igniter. Kohana living in a community allows for rapid expansion and fixes.
All in all, I think Kohana is a great fork on an already great framework. Keep up the good work. If you are worried about it only working on PHP 5, well, PHP 4’s end of life was the 31st of December 2007 already! Convert! At least bugs will be fixed till 2008-08-08. Cool date they chose!
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Code Igniter, Open Source, PHP, Programming, web development Stii
Dec
06
Every programming language seem to have some sort of Ruby on Rails like framework. PHP got a couple lot. Python got Django (Django is not Rails though). Now the BBC went and made a Rails-like web framework with PERL.
This I found quite amusing:
“Like most organisations the BBC has its own technical ecosystem; the BBC’s is pretty much restricted to Perl and static files. This means that the vast majority of the BBC’s website is statically published - in other words HTML is created internally and FTP’ed to the web servers. There are then a range of Perl scripts that are used to provide additional functionality and interactivity.”
Their sites are statically published?! I did not know that and find it quite, uhm, shocking that a big organization would have such a primitive way of publishing their sites.
“For applications that run internally we use Ruby on Rail. Because we enjoy using it…”
No surprise there. 
They built PERL on Rails because:
“We need to use Perl, there are restrictions on which libraries can and can’t be installed on the live environment and we needed a framework that could handle significant load.”
Now I’m just wondering, are they planning to release the source code, or is it going to stay an internal framework exclusive to the BBC? Should be quite interesting to see it and experiment with it. No-one knows yet. This part of their site is powered by PERL on Rails, they say.
They would almost certainly have to change the name. When PHP on Rails first saw the light, it was quickly slapped with a lawyers letter and had to change its name. Now known as PHP on Trax.
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Open Source, PHP, Programming, Python, Ruby (on Rails), Software Development, web development Stii
Dec
04
I’ve just listened to the Ruby on Rails podcast where they interviewed Avi Bryant from Seaside, which is a web framework developed in Smalltalk. I’m no Smalltalk guru, but I know it is quite a mature object orientated language so it does sound very interesting! Specially due to the fact that the framework not only eliminates SQL, but also the HTML! That and the fact that it allows for developing modal components on the web, much like you would for windows or osx. It all sounds extremely exciting and interesting, but I would probably not have any opportunity to play with it anytime soon! If you have or do get the opportunity, please let me know what you think!
You can listen to the podcast on odeo, or download the mp3 here.
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Open Source, Programming, Ruby (on Rails), Software Development, web development Stii
Sep
10
Recently (on the 4th of September), Inside the box, a Lenovo blog, announced that they are planning to ship with a Linux Distro as the default OS installed on their system. In true Open Source fashion, they decided to run a poll so that people can vote for which Distro they would like to see shipping on a Lenovo. The results are astounding! At the moment Ubuntu is by far the distro of choice!
They have 5883 votes with Debian as a close second on 1089 results.
You have to admit, Ubuntu being a South African produce, it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside when something like this happens!
Hop on over to Inside the box and cast your vote!
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Linux, Open Source, South Africa Stii
Aug
17
“Open Source” is not the right term to use here, I know, but what I’m getting at is the same kind of philosophy applies. A cracker cracks software. He then either make the cracked software available for free over P2P (see the analogy?) or he tell others how he did it on some devious crack site… Almost like a Freshmeat for piracy, but with tons of pr0n pop-ups and malicious code… The cracker himself does not always benefit hugely from it other than having commercial software for free…
This article got some valid points! http://tlug.jp/articles/Windows_Is_Free The impact of piracy is far more damaging to the FSF and the Open Source community than what is realised! (Thanks Capdog on muti!)
If you start scrutinizing Microsoft Windows licences, you’ll see that there is ACTUALLY very, VERY little legal copies out in the market! I remeber a couple of years ago when I was working as a sys-admin, they nailed one of our customers due to the fact that some hardware components was replaced and Windows re-installed without re-purchasing a new licence. The fact that Microsoft does not cannot control it, actually is to their advantage! Talk about “guerilla marketing”… Hows that for a strategy!
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Tags: piracy, windows, microsoft, opensource, software
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Business, Open Source Stii
Jun
21
With the coming of Joomla! 1.5 there is some serious ripples in the pond. Many believe the core Joomla! team has taken GPL and licencing too serious this time. The current Joomla! distribution (that is version 1.0.x) has a (and I quote) ‘rider’ which reads:
“10. I have written a Component, Module, Template for Joomla. Do I have to release it under the GPL?
No.
The GPL allows you to write your own extensions for Joomla and to
release those extensions under whatever license you chose.”
(see: http://jcd-a.org/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,28/topic,100.0/ if you have a issue with the ‘rider’)
With the coming of release 1.5, they are changing their tune. They are now saying:
“11. Encryption of Joomla! extensions is a violation of the GPL
This means that installing/adding a component/module/plugin to Joomla!
is creating a combined work, if the third party developer doesn’t want
to violate the GPL he will need to release the module/component/plugin
under the GPL or GPL-compatible license. It also means that a third
party developer cannot encrypt his extension, without also making the
code available when distributing the extension (hence the term open
source license).”
In other words, before Joomla! 1.5, you had the freedom to do pretty much anything with Joomla! If you wanted to develop commercial extensions for clients, you were allowed to do that. There are developers out there making a living of doing so.
By the looks of things, these developers are now standing a good chance to lose that rights and in effect their “livelyhood”. And according to the article on a forum, there are close to a thousand commercial extensions! This is quite serious. Most commercial extension developers has ceased further development until this issue gets resolved.
It would seem that in this case, freedom is jailing itself. Should freedom not be the freedom to do what you like? By the looks of it, freedom in this case means “freedom as long as you do like us”.
How would this impact on the Joomla! developer community? Would it constitute yet another split, like with Joomla! / Mambo? Are those commercial developers going to go elsewhere (take their components to a platform where thay have the freedom to develop commercially)?
An interesting dilema!
Read the forum discussion here.
You’ll find a nice summary of the debate over here.
technorati tags:joomla, gpl, license, extensions, commercial
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Open Source, Software Development Stii
Apr
02
While Ruby on Rails and Python is way ahead in the parsing of HTML for microformats, PHP is trailing behind it seems. We have found a couple of classes that can do it, but none without some quirks.
The one option was hKit which is a PHP 5.x parser. The problem with this parser is that it only works on PHP 5.x since it requires the SimpleXML PHP extension. Our problem is that not all PHP developed sites are running on PHP 5.x. That is not an ideal solution then.
The other option we found was the Microformats Parser over at PHPClasses developed by Ve Bailovity. This is an award winning class and is dependant of the xArray class also found there and also developed by Ve. This opion is much better since it works on PHP 4.3 or better and requires the DOM XML extension. The issue is that it does not work “out-of-the-box”. It worked beautifully when tested with the HTML file that accompanies the classes, but as soon as I tried it with some “real-world” microformat implementations (tried on http://corkd.com and http://www.thinkvitamin.com/), it failed. Sad, since it is a beautiful script!
So what do we need? We need a class that works on ALL versions of PHP and that can process ANY form of HTML or XHTML. We all know not everyone cares much for their mark-up and therefor you will find all kinds of funny and weird issues, so it must be extremely forgiving when parsing the HTML document. It must also have some proper security and anti-spam checks built in, since this could end up being a SPAMMERS dream if not properly protected! We’re on it.
We have started to develop our own parser class for kupa, aptly named kupaParser and will release it under the GPL for anyone who would like to take advantage of microformats on PHP. Will keep you updated on the progress as we go along.
technorati tags:kupa, microformats, semanticweb, php
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Kick-ass Tools, Open Source, PHP, Semantic Web, Software Development Stii
Mar
30
Below is a link to a demonstration screencast of how the upcoming Release 6.0 of Netbeans will support Ruby on Rails development. I cannot wait to try it, but accoring to the release schedule, we’ll have to wait for the beta release until May or June. Pity…
http://www.netbeans.org/download/flash/jruby_on_rails/jruby_on_rails.html
technorati tags:netbeans, opensource, ide, programming, rubyonrails
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Open Source, Programming Stii
Feb
23
We’ve all had some experience with Poisonous people at some or other stage of our careers. This is an excellent video of how to protect your project against it and how to survive (Google Tech Talks January 25, 2007). Although this is focussed specifically on Open Source, you could apply it to ANY project. Not only Open Source or software development.
I especially love the statement they made:
Perfect is the enemy of Good!
There is very much truth to be found in this… Its a long video (55 minutes), but I urge you to watch it.
technorati tags:projectmanagement, opensource, google, softwaredevelopment
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Open Source, Software Development Stii
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